How public funds are used to pay for English-language articles portraying Orbán as a brilliant leader

"I told the visiting journalists and publishers that they were going to be blown away by this guy, because they're not going to believe how different he is from the way he is portrayed in the Western media. He's sharp, funny, brilliant, and completely confident," Rod Dreher, an American journalist living in Hungary wrote about Viktor Orbán in the American Conservative three years ago, after participating in a "small group session" with the Hungarian Prime Minister.

These flattering words are not interesting because Rod Dreher is so fond of Orbán, but because during this period, his salary was paid, if only indirectly, by Hungarian taxpayers. There is a tangled web leading from the public purse to the author's article, a very important part of which is the Lajos Batthyány Foundation (BLA) and its multiple tentacles. This foundation has used public funds to support far more than just a few articles, projects, or organizations sympathetic to the Hungarian government in recent years. The above is just one of many articles from the past 16 years that praised Orbán and were paid for with public funds.

"In order to consolidate the young Hungarian democracy and our national values, the country needs an organization that can serve as a platform for young people and citizens committed to politics," the Batthyány Lajos Foundation declares on its website. The foundation was established in 1991 by József Antall, the country's first freely elected prime minister, and his colleagues from the MDF (Hungarian Democratic Forum) party. For a while, the BLA functioned primarily as a party foundation, but there was a longer period when its activities were much less visible.

As time went on, more and more Fidesz and KDNP politicians appeared on its board of trustees. From 1998 onwards, László Kövér, Antal Rogán, József Szájer, Zsolt Semjén, János Martonyi, and Gergely Gulyás, among others, were all members at some point. Incidentally, this foundation was one of Rogán's first places of employment. There are no longer any Fidesz politicians on the board of trustees today, but Tamás Dezső, the former dean of ELTE BTK, and the head of the Migration Research Institute now serves as its president and sits on the board alongside several lesser-known names.

Then, in 2018, the foundation that seemed forgotten started receiving more public funding, although some money had already been trickling in from various government ministries, including the Prime Minister's Office, in prior years as well. What is certain is that the BLA has over the past ten years regularly received funding from the Prime Minister's Office, which was established in 2015 and has been led by Rogán from the outset, with the amount increasing year on year.

Documents detailing the ministry's expenditures exceeding HUF 5 million (nearly 13 thousand euros) show that in 2016, for example, the foundation received HUF 254 million, and in 2017, HUF 313 million for their “operations and the implementation of programs”. In the following years, these amounts increased significantly, with Rogán's ministry allocating HUF 1 billion (2.5 million euros) to them in 2018 and HUF 2 billion the following year.

A significant turning point in the foundation's life in terms of resources and spending came in the fall of 2020, when a two-thirds decision by the Fidesz-KDNP majority transformed it into a so-called public interest asset management foundation (kekva). According to K-Monitor's summary, the essence of such foundations is that

the state provides public funds and public assets to enable them to perform their tasks, allowing these foundations to manage their finances with virtually complete freedom.

Many other previously state-owned assets, including universities, have been transferred to such asset management foundations, and, for example, the state simply gave the sailing marina and chateau in Révfülöp, by lake Balaton to MCC’s foundation. But these are just a few examples among many: As Átlátszó wrote in 2021, assets worth thousands of billions of forints had been transferred from the state to foundations controlled by the ruling parties.

After becoming an asset management foundation, the BLA also received a very valuable building. During the foundation’s 2020 restructuring, the government injected a small amount of capital into the BLA too, so that it would have the minimum capital required for asset management foundations. They were then given the Lónyay–Hatvany villa, a building located in the prestigious Buda Castle District, nestled between the Prime Minister's Office and Rogán's ministry, offering panoramic views. The valuable, then half-finished building was purchased in 2014 by one of the foundations of the Hungarian National Bank for 3.4 billion forints, and then renovated for a further 4.5 billion forints. The villa was then bought back by the Orbán government in 2020, but they quickly parted with the public asset, giving the entire property to the Batthyány Lajos Foundation for free, just a few months later.

Ever since the BLA became a public asset management foundation, there have been reports year after year, even month after month, about how certain ministries – most notably the Prime Minister's Office led by Rogán – are pumping more and more money into it. At the end of 2020, the BLA, which had just been transformed into a public asset management foundation, immediately appeared on the Cabinet Office's list of contracts with a spectacular sum: it received 3.5 billion forints from the ministry for "the purposes specified in the foundation's statutes". This was actually the second such round in 2020, as they had already received a similar amount at the beginning of that same year. They didn't have to wait long for the next batch of money in 2021 either, with Rogán and his team giving them another 2.8 billion forints in March.

According to the ministry's publicly available list of contracts, by 2022, 6.4 billion forints were transferred from Antal Rogán's ministry "for the purpose of achieving the objectives set out in the foundation's statutes." In 2023, the Prime Minister's Office provided 9.2 billion forints in support, and then in 2024, with the election approaching in a much more tension-filled environment than before, events accelerated: the foundation received 14.5 billion forints in public funds.

Foundations pumped full of money through various ministries could be spending their money on important, politically independent causes recognised as being in the greater public interest, but the problem is that in most cases this is not what happens, and the Lajos Batthyány Foundation discussed in this article is no exception.

It is worth examining how this considerable sum of money – by way of comparison, last year the government promised an additional 17 billion forints for the country’s entire welfare sector – transferred from the ministry to the Batthyány Lajos Foundation is distributed further. One of the biggest winners of public funds awarded to various organizations through the BLA is the Alapjogokért Központ (Center for Fundamental Rights) and its owner, Jogállam és Igazság Nonprofit Ltd.

The Center for Fundamental Rights, which organizes the right-wing conference called CPAC Hungary, defines itself as a "an institute specializing in public law analysis," but in reality, they are simply campaigning for Fidesz, and their research leaders and experts regularly appear in the public media and other pro-government media outlets to explain why the government's policies are good. They have also run a 300 million forint anti-migration campaign, and created merch with their logo. The Center for Fundamental Rights also has enough money for publishing books, which even allows for a little bit of sovereignist, tradition-preserving fun: a 245-page book with no content entitled Why You Should Vote for the Liberals.

So how much did the Center for Fundamental Rights receive from the BLA alone? In 2022, they were awarded 2 billion forints for their operations, in 2023 they received more than 3 billion, in 2024 another billion more, and last year their parent company, Jogállam és Igazság Nonprofit, received a record amount of 6 billion forints. Although this is effectively public money, these figures are not easy to obtain. Every year, requests for public interest data must be submitted, and only then can the public learn about the details of how the money was distributed.

But the Center for Fundamental Rights received plenty of money even before 2022: From 2013 to the end of 2021, Hungarian taxpayers contributed at least 2.5 billion forints to the running of the Center for Fundamental Rights and to ensuring that the Centre and various public figures and groups commissioned and further supported by them could legitimise and represent the messages of the Orbán government to the public.

The Batthyány Lajos Foundation is a strong proponent of Orbán's policies, not only through its support for the Center for Fundamental Rights, but also through its own affiliate, the Danube Institute, which it finances.

It is through this organization that with the help of the BLA, Orbánism is practically being exported abroad, mostly to the United States. As Átlátszó previously reported, the Danube Institute is one of the government's main tools for building its network abroad. The institute is mainly involved in organizing conferences and financing the work of visiting researchers. In a previous document related to funding, they stated their goal as

“strengthening the international representation of Hungarian government positions among Anglo-Saxon political decision-makers.”

It is here, through the Danube Institute that Rod Dreher, mentioned at the beginning of the article for praising Orbán in the American Conservative, comes back into the picture. An American civil rights organization (SPLC) had previously reported that the Hungarian government had paid millions of forints to several American right-wing lobbyists through the Lajos Batthyány Foundation in exchange for portraying the Orbán government in a positive light in their articles. Under the six-month contract signed in early 2023, Dreher was required, among other things, to publish articles about his experiences in Hungary in the American media. For his publications and other services (participation in Danube Institute events, etc.), he received a monthly salary of $8,750 (approximately 3.1 million forints) for six months, as stipulated in his contract.

And this is just one example among many: one American right-wing activist was paid 12 million forints (USD 31 thousand) for a six-week study trip to Hungary. The Danube Institute, funded by the BLA, and one of the Orbán government's main international ideological think tanks, paid more than half a billion forints to its foreign collaborators by the end of 2024 alone. The Institute which employs 32 people is always ready to analyze how successful Viktor Orbán's trip to Washington was, organize geopolitical summits, or even make a movie based on a book about how “No one in the West is free anymore”.

In addition to larger companies and organizations, dozens of smaller and bigger projects have also received state funding through the Batthyány Lajos Foundation. In 2023, Szabad Európa reported that a Brussels-based English-language news portal cost Hungarian taxpayers more than 1.6 billion forints. As the news portal reported at the time, The European Conservative, which is linked to Fidesz in more ways than one, received 1.6 billion forints from the BLA before the fall of 2023. Another example is Budapest Műhely, whose experts, armed with 2.5 billion forints from the BLA are tasked with dissecting the problems of Budapest, ensuring that their analyses are in line with the political views of Fidesz.

It would take all day to list all the organizations that have received state, i.e., taxpayer money, and which do the bidding of the Orbán government through conducting research, publishing analyses, organizing events, or producing propaganda that portrays the government in a good light abroad.

• The Rubicon Institute, founded by the head of the MCC, Zoltán Szalai, received 660 million forints from the BLA.
• Millions were given to the Drug Research Institute (Drogkutató Intézet) which compared cannabis to the swastika and which also organized a "summit on drug policy," where no addiction specialists or toxicologists spoke.
• In the early years of its operation, the previously completely unknown company operating the Scruton café received 600 million forints, after which it replaced coffee shops of the Cafe Frei chain in Libri bookstores, which had been taken over by the MCC.
• Another 89 million forints went to a design magazine that interviewed the Prime Minister's daughter, Ráhel Orbán.

The Batthyány Lajos Foundation, however, is just a drop in the ocean, as it is not the only organization through which Fidesz has managed to ensure that public funds "lose their public nature" so that they can then be used to promote their own policies both domestically and internationally.